UN Office of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide and the International Criminal Court Prosecutor: Investigate the Possibility that Israel is Committing the Crime of Genocide Against the Palestinian People

But the Basque and Crimean flags are deemed political, and therefore are forbidden. So is the flag of Palestine. For Europe, having Israel as a Western-aligned “watchdog” in the Middle East is far too important to allow a Palestinian flag to be seen on camera.

Winning Eurovision has been part of a long, cynical project by Israel to promote itself as a feminist, gay-friendly utopia – which has included a very literal instance of pinkwashing when it painted fighter jets pink – to distract from its brutal oppression of the Palestinian people.

Hosting Eurovision next year will be a further boon for that project. Artists from around Europe (and Australia) will descend on the country, posting to social media snaps of their carefully stage-managed tours.

Bachelor of arts and education student Jordan Rizk implored students to keep campaigning: “I’m here for unconditional support for the Palestinian people, who undergo apartheid, decades of genocide, and I’m here as a young Arab male to continue that legacy of my ancestors who fought against this colonial ideology.

“The reason why I came today was to give a voice to uplift those in the community at UNSW who want to promote the Palestinian cause.”

The protests were organised by the state branch of the National Union of Students as part of the Books Not Bombs campaign, which aims to end the links between universities and the military.

This march and camp in which will continue for six weeks recreates the movement of refugees from now Israeli cities to Gaza. Residents of Gaza are demanding their Right of Return to these erased and ethnically cleansed cities in commemoration of 70 years of Nakba, or Catastrophe which marks the beginning of genocide and Israeli occupation.

Below are presented details of this week’s 100th Anniversary of the WW1 Australian Beersheba Charge, the UK Balfour Declaration and the commencement of the Palestinian Genocide in 1917.

31 October 1917 Australian Beersheba Charge, British Empire conquest of Palestine and Palestinian Famine.

This week variously ignorant or mendacious Australian jingoists are celebrating the 100th anniversary of the famous charge of the Australian 4th Light Horse Brigade of the Anzac (Australian and New Zealand Army Corps) Mounted Division on 31 October 1917 that captured Beersheba and thus fatally compromised the Ottoman Turkish defensive line stretching from Beersheba to Gaza on the Mediterranean coast. Palestine and thence Syria rapidly fell to the British under General Allenby [32]. While this was a famous cavalry charge that is much celebrated in mindlessly racist and jingoist Australia, the immediate consequences for the Palestinians were devastating. War-imposed deprivation in Palestine under the genocidal British was associated with a Palestinian Famine in which 100,000 Palestinian died as estimated from a catastrophic 100,000 population deficit in WW1 Palestine [33-36].

Settler colonial societies are a distinct type of imperialist formation, which are premised on the racist elimination of the indigenous population through various means, including ethnic cleansing, genocide and/or assimilation.

Unlike other forms of colonialism that centre on the exploitation of resources, settler colonialism is primarily concerned with the control of territory and the elimination of the indigenous population in order to replace it with a settler population. As the late Australian academic and leading settler-colonial theorist, Patrick Wolfe, notes: “settler colonialism destroys to replace”.

Before, during and after Israel’s foundation, the Zionist movement sought to control as much of historic Palestine as possible, establishing a permanent settler population by eliminating and replacing the indigenous Palestinian Arab population.

The Israeli government and its allies refuse to accept the sincerity of this or any of the other changes to the charter, and continue to insist that Hamas is a terrorist organisation to be crushed without pity. What else could be expected from a racist state committed to the genocide of the Palestinian people?

About 2000 people rallied in Sydney on February 23 to protest the federal government hosting Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and its support for Israel’s latest land grabs.

Uncle Ken Canning said: “The same murderous colonial mentality that is killing Palestinians landed here in 1788 and decimated us to 2.7% of the population. It is little wonder that [Prime Minister Malcolm] Turnbull welcomes Netanyahu, they are twin brothers in genocide.”

To jolt the politicians and their media acolytes, I’ll refer to genocide. Such a charge can be justified though it is usually regarded as a form of diplomatic blasphemy, too risky to make.

The 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, refers to any acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.

Such acts would include killing members of a group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.

Writing in December 2016, in Aljazeera English, the Jewish social analyst Stanley Cohen concluded that each of these genocidal type acts “has been perpetrated by Israel, seemingly with almost proud boast, and no accountability, for almost 70 unbroken years.

Israel is a prime target for ATT sanctions. The alarming Israeli documentary, The Lab by Yotam Feldman, reveals that Israel is a military economy that has locked 1.6 million Palestinians in its military laboratory cage where weaponry is battle-tested on Gaza. Billions of international dollars from western defense departments, including Australian, fuel the demand and validate Israeli atrocities;

“A key player in the military industries told me that the operational testing in Gaza of Elbit’s BMS (Battle Management System – a special internet-like system for ground forces), a huge project worth $1 billion, has allowed Elbit to raise its price in a deal signed a year later with Australia…A salesman for the IAI (Israel Aerospace Industries) told me that assassinations and operations in Gaza bring about an increase of tens of percentage points in company sales”. ~Yotam Feldman

To boost Israeli arms sales, Palestinian families have suffered three Israeli onslaughts of ‘systematic genocide’ wars in six years and are condemned to a life that is unnatural, stressful, traumatic, waiting for the next Israeli weapons testing that will again turn Gaza into ground zero.

The similarities between Australia and Israel should come as no surprise. Settler colonial societies are a distinct type of imperialist formation, which are premised on the racist elimination of the indigenous population through various means, including ethnic cleansing, genocide and/or assimilation.